MSI Master Overclocking Arena 2010 Benelux Final

Date: 28th May 2010, Timezone, well, euh.. Dutch time zone? 3 Belgian overclockers start to drive at 6 o´clock in the morning towards the city of Eindhoven. Target was the MSI building. Mission : could we get one of the two Belgian teams through the MSI MOA Benelux finals. First prize a ticket for two to Paris, the city of... overclockers. How did the little Shrimps do? Read on to find out!

Aquamark3

Aquamark3

Right after the Superpi runs , we knew we had a good efficient score and our CPU clocked pretty good ( according the rumours you hear during such an event).Only less than a few hours to go for Aquamark3. This was our first time with a GTX480. No idea how it would scale with this kind of CPU ? How it would go without hardmods and only the voltages supplied by the MSI Afterburner Software ?

We did some quick runs with the old GF6600GT card. 240Bclock could be stable enough to pass AM3. Time to pop in the prepped GTX480.

Nicely prepped card by Pascal and Walter

Once we tried to run AM3 with the same settings that worked 100% with the older, but much slower card, AM3 would freeze, crash and the rig got very unstable. A little bit more cold for the CPU, reclaimed only a tiny bit stability. But our Bclocks were far lower than before, 225 vs 240. However we managed to pull off a 329.000 score from one of our first full runs.

Time to OC the GTX480. When opening the MSI Afterburner program we didn't spot a GPU clock setting, only Shader , ram and voltage... Walter said he moved the Shader slider as it was always twice the core speed. And indeed it worked fine, thx for the tip dude !

Going from stock GPU clocks to a moderate 1000Mhz ( 1.2VGPUcore ) and the cards rams at 2000mhz, resulted in a mere 2000 points gain. Nice to know, but it was the CPU speed that was going to be crucial to get the win. Pushing Bclock a bit more resulted in a score of 338.000. When trying to “validate” the rig froze up and thus no official score for us.

No problem we thought, so we started all over again. Blue screen, freeze after freeze, then again a blue screen. We had to stabilise the setup again... At first it seemed it wasn't going to happen ; lower GPU temps, more volts, looser ram settings, nothing helped. Only lowering the CPU Bclock got our setup stable... Major bummer as with the cheapo card it did 240Bclock without any issue. Now we had to settle for only 225.

Shot of the back of the card after half an hour, ice starts to appear, card was never benched lower then -55°C

After we tried to go up again Aquamark 3 remained unpredictable, weird as we redid a pi run and all was stable there. Wait single threaded works but AM3 doesn't ? A Bad core ? Luckily for us we had one flawless run of 343.000. And this without any GPU overclock! Pure CPU overclock and RAM bandwidth (if you can call it that with single channel ) The search for the strong cores started. After some testing core 2-4 seemed to be the weaker ones. So we attributed core 1 and 3 to run AM3.

From there on it went pretty straightforward. The system was sort of stable again, just due to this core selection. 348.000 was saved to the USB stick. Half an hour before the end of the official time a final run at 240Block, PCIE 120mhz resulted in 350.000.

Though Massbo, as we know him, never settles for anything and started reexploring the gpu now. First by increasing only GPU rams, then GPU core speed, finally both. And yep he nailed a 352.000 run, but it froze up on the Belgian team for the final screenshot. Too bad, but as we heard most adversaries were not even breaching 340.000 we agreed to call it a day.

Thomas had to use his hairdryer frequently to warm the pot up again, just to get his rig to boot normally

Mister Tweakers.net, Marc aka the ref of the day, playing minesweeper for hours continuously, and getting top scores! :p